I remembered the stuffed fox on that list. Also the bear. I remembered the twenty silver fox tails. I liked to set a silver fox head, the mouth open around the head of the otter on the muff, and leave it lying out to make the other grisettes laugh. The stuffed otter I kept up in my room with me for company. In the dark, by lamplight, the glass beads for his eyes seemed always to be almost alive.
I’d found him in a corner of the fur closet, covered in three marabout boas. I quickly propped the boas on something else and then pushed him back behind several cloaks so he couldn’t be seen. A few nights later, as the courtyard blazed with the lights of a ball and the staff drank bad sour wine near the pantry stairs, I went down quickly to the basement fur closet and brought him to my room. I knew I could be arrested for theft, but there was none who missed him. He was tribute and sent, I imagined, from Quebec.
He had been made so he stood upright, as if he’d seen something. There were faint black silk stitches on his wrist, repairing the tear in the fur from the trap. In the dark, he looked whole and alive.
If he could have spoken, I would have known then, without any doubt, that I was lost in a fairy tale, but he never spoke. The single speaking animal in the palace was a parrot, a present to the Empress who’d sent it home with a maid, where it learned to swear and curse like the maid’s lovers. Sometimes I could hear it shouting, Tais-toi! Tais-toi! The creature had become much beloved by the Empress after that but was thought to be too obscene to be allowed anywhere near the apartments, and instead the bird was kept in the basement with us.
In days as carefully measured as Her Majesty’s gowns, I grew to be at peace with my lot in life somehow. I didn’t imagine that I would stay there forever, nor did I see any opportunity to leave. I was hidden deep inside the enormous machinery of the institution that was dressing the Empress for her public and private appearances, and what I thought, what I looked like, and who I was were of no importance to anyone as long as I accomplished my singular tasks. I had found a very strange and beautiful kind of shelter, and there was work I could accomplish easily. Here, no one knew me as anything other than une muette of indistinct origin. I was sure I was content to spend my life inside the warm circle of light my lamp made, whether it lit my room or my passage to the vast cloakroom of the Empress.
I was very grateful, then, to the Comtesse, for introducing me to the chamberlain, and did exactly as she asked.
§
Once a week I left the Tuileries Palace for an afternoon, something allowed all of us. It was under the pretense of visiting an invented aunt and uncle, and so for this visit I had a dress, a careful blue one, dark and plain. The other grisettes liked to mock it a little when I came down in it.
It had never belonged to the Empress.
There were not so many uncles and aunts for us all, and like many of the grisettes who pretended to visit a relation on their one day of freedom, I went to the Bois de Boulogne, where I would present myself as if I were like any other girl who went there looking to make an extra coin on her day’s leave on a ride through the park with a gentleman in his carriage. The procession of vehicles and horses was full of people either occupied at this pastime or busy looking at those occupied, a strangely public thing, like a theater’s boxes spilled out into the light of the afternoon.
There was not one of our number who did not need some other way to make money. At times, stepping into or out of the carriage that picked me up, I had the sense of stepping over the death that waited if I was any poorer than I was. For me, it was always the same carriage and the same gentleman who left with me and brought me to this aunt I was to be visiting.
My “aunt,” such as she was, was the Comtesse, the one woman in Europe who knew herself to be Eugénie’s true rival and perhaps the only other woman who could have been empress. She felt her mother had bungled her chance at marrying her off to the Emperor, and so when she was sent by Cavour to Paris as part of Italy’s diplomatic mission to France to seduce Louis-Napoléon to the Italian cause, married as she was to a man she did not love, she preferred this duty to all others and went willingly. She was so beautiful that when she entered late to her very first official ball in Paris the musicians stopped playing, causing the Emperor and Empress to look to see what had happened.
This was a story she loved to tell.
Like the Empress, the Comtesse had red-gold hair that was sometimes light, sometimes dark, but unlike Eugénie’s, her eyes were a brilliant green and set off by her pale skin. Her breasts and her feet were as celebrated as she was, and she often wore no corset and no shoes, letting her breasts loose in her bodice and slipping off her slippers when receiving male guests at home.